Wanted in Pakistan: Competent Counterinsurgency

The other night, Richard Holbrooke appeared on “Charlie Rose” after his first trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan as Obama’s new special representative to the region. This jumped out at me from the transcript:

If you were to ask me the biggest thing we could do that would help everyone, it would be get the Pakistanis to redeploy more troops to the western border. Right now, they have 120,000 regular army and 50,000 frontier core, and far more, double or triple that on the east. If they could shift more to the west, that would be critically valuable, and not just shift them in regular army formations, but train them for counterinsurgency. They are a regular army trained since independence to defend against India. And like the American army in Vietnam, they’re looking backward to the past wars and not forward to the kind of unconventional counterinsurgency war that must be fought in the mountainous tribal areas of western Pakistan.

In other words, now that we’ve had to learn to fight insurgencies (again), we need to help the Pakistanis do the same. If so, this piece in today’s Times, about American military advisers in Pakistan, contains worrying news. Not the revelation that seventy mostly Special Forces troops are training the Pakistani military and providing advice and intelligence on operations in the tribal areas and the Northwest Frontier province. That’s neither worrying nor particularly surprising, though the news is sure to spark protests in Pakistan, where our popularity is at an all-time low. What’s worrying is the nature of the help American forces are giving: intelligence for Pakistani air strikes and commando operations aimed at killing or capturing Taliban and Qaeda leaders.

What’s wrong with this picture? Have a look at the Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual, written under the leadership of General Petraeus. What experts call the kill-capture model was exactly the wrong approach to take during the early years of the Iraq war. This kind of emphasis always ends up creating more new enemies than it can eliminate old ones. Only when the military changed its strategy to protecting the population did the war in Iraq take a turn for the better.

Every insurgency is different—another key point of the manual—but the crucial lesson of focussing on securing civilians, which is counterintuitive for almost every army on earth, doesn’t change. This is not, to put it mildly, one of the Pakistani military’s strengths, as seen most recently in the Swat Valley (be sure to watch this poignant new video about a girls’ school that was forced to close last month). Whether the U.S. can re-orient Pakistan toward fighting an effective counterinsurgency in militant areas, as Holbrooke is urging, is hard to say. Iraq’s military might be a more attractive partner than Pakistan’s, which seems to prefer a strategy of cutting deals that leave the militants in control of areas they’ve already terrorized. (This is what the experts call the wave-depart model.) But it’s disappointing to learn that our small effort is focussed on adopting an approach that didn’t work in Iraq and isn’t working in Afghanistan. The Times story had the feel of military spin to counter the claim that airstrikes aren’t hitting the right targets. But this misses something even more basic than the target.

The U.S. government has just released its new counterinsurgency guide for the civilian agencies, written under the direction of David Kilcullen. During the Bush years, a sort of counterinsurgency insurgency sprang up both in and out of the government and military—a group of thoughtful dissidents who, from very early on, tried to change American strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kilcullen was one of the key figures, and now other members of the group are being appointed to or talked about for important posts in the Obama Administration, including Janine Davidson as deputy assistant secretary of defense for plans, Colin Kahl for the Middle East, and Phil Carter for detainee issues (many Obama national-security appointments are being reported by Laura Rozen on her new Foreign Policy blog).

I know them all, think highly of them, would be very happy if they join the new administration, and wish them well. They’ve all absorbed the hard lessons of the past seven years of war, often up close. I don’t know if there’s still time to apply these lessons in Afghanistan, and I don’t know if Pakistan even wants to learn them. But the new group in Washington might want to send a copy of both counterinsurgency manuals to the government in Islamabad, and another copy to the team of American advisers there.